Multi-View Edge-based Stereo by Incorporating Spatial Coherence

A limitation of the state-of-art multi-view reconstruction algorithms is in their ability to handle scenes with very little texture or a lot of clutter. Texture-less scenes with clutter are traditionally difficult for dense multi-view stereo methods. Feature-based stereo algorithms, in particular, edge- based methods, are better suited for these scenes. The success of the edge-based reconstruction heavily depends on the amount of the prior information used. This paper introduces an algorithm that extends the well-known plane- sweep algorithm by incorporating spatial coherence of the scene. The method utilizes the geometric consistency derived from the continuity of three-dimensional edge points as a geometric constraint in addition to previously known multi-view image constraints. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real data are provided to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed method.